Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 31my poor mother, if you were now alive, I would not teaze you I would give the world to let you know that I am sorry for what I have done: you died, thinking me ungrateful; and lamenting that I did not die when you gave me suck. I shall never oh! never see you more.' (p. 382) But the most insistent and transparent frame of register remains the moment inhabited by the emerging writing subject: the book was written at the end of 1787, immediately after Wollstonecraft returned from her post as a governess with the Kings in Dublin. Mary, in this context, is also a figure representative of Wollstonecraft's `favourite' 14 year-old charge, Margaret King. King later took the title Lady Mount Cashell, and later still adopted the preferred name of Mrs Mason. (Cameron, 1961, p. 49) Original Stories captures a further incident of love between women: one caught irresolvably between the matrilineal (affective, pedagogic) and the horizontal (desire). Mrs Mason is `a woman of tenderness and discernment, a near relation, who was induced to take on herself the important charge through motives of compassion'. She is read as Wollstonecraft's selfimage because she sounds so much like the Wollstonecraft of Thoughts and of the later Vindications. But this Wollstonecraft is configured as a writing subject whose signature closes these publications. Prior to producing Thoughts there was no Wollstonecraft as a writing subject, other than the Wollstonecraft of letters, whose voice crackles with adolescent longing and pride. Thoughts was written almost immediately following the death of Blood: Wollstonecraft returned from Lisbon in early 1786, closed down the Newington Green school, and almost immediately started writing for publication. The voice that emerges is embodied in the character of Mrs Mason in Original Stories. If we accept Freud's account of melancholia, it would be appropriate to suggest that this ideal voice is at least in part an `incorporation' of Blood, whose loss for Wollstonecraft was chronic and irresolvable. Wollstonecraft had planned her future life around the prospect of setting up home with Blood, and her efforts to produce an independent income were directed towards a dream of domestic harmony with a woman she loved with `a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind'. Godwin's description of the first meeting between Wollstonecraft and Blood from which this phrase has been lifted draws attention to the writerly aspect of their relationship:
